


Baby Blankets

by ialpiriel



Series: The Doofus Noodle Gets Up To Shit [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Lonesome Road DLC, eating disorder mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 02:10:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4589067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Courier finds some unexpected familiar detritus in the Hopeville men's barracks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby Blankets

Ulysses is still high up on the cliff. She walks past him when she comes to the Divide, and they might nod at each other, but they don’t talk. He doesn’t even turn to look at her, and she doesn’t glance over to look at him.

She comes back only once in a while, settles her feet into the radioactive dust of the Mile and lets it burn down her throat. It’s reassuring, somehow, to think that the radiation here won’t kill her, won’t toast her insides. Speeds up how fast her face rots off, sure, but she won’t end up fried and vomiting blood and so full of tumors her guts shut down. Least not yet. Still time to go feral, of course, but.

She combs the divide, most times she comes back. She passed near Ashton, once, long while back, didn’t even enter it, saw the silo’s light blinking in the distance and figured a flashing red light probably wasn’t a good sign. She does her looking now. She’s glad she finds no civilian bodies. Ulysses talked about the civilians. Made her want to hurl if she thought about it too long--still does. So she doesn’t, mostly. Just sacks the place and digs up what she can. There’s a lot of valuable stuff here yet.

She’s hunkered up in the men’s barracks tonight, doors barricaded against the marked men and the tunnelers both. Tunnelers are less of a problem out here, but the marked men are thicker than flies on shit, especially if she’s been making noise. A few mines out on the road help keep ‘em off, most times, but last time she was in Hopeville she’d had to climb up onto the roof and start mowing them down with the rifle she’d found the first time she’d come through. Most of ‘em don’t get back up, after that. Not even the ones in the Mile.

But it’s a long night--the wind is wheezing between the shrinking boards of the barracks, and she spends her late evening shoving scraps of blankets into the cracks. Keep out what dust she can. It still piles up against the far wall, in little drifts. Geiger counter in her pip-boy screams when she passes it near them; not really a surprise, if she’s gonna be honest. The fact it can read anything at all in this place is more surprising.

It’s nearing midnight, according to her pip-boy, when she figures she’s done what she can for the cracks in the walls, and sets to ransacking. She eats the cans of cram and pork’n’beans first–-after Arcade and Julie kept her on bed rest for a _week_ because she passed out _once_ she’s been better about eating meat and eating sugar–-and stockpiles the potato crisps and snack cakes for later. The box of sugar bombs goes down like the stale tablets of condensed sugar and artificial flavoring it is.

Once she’s eaten and checked that the doors are secure (again), it’s time to get drunk.

The bottle of whiskey was unopened and looked like good shit, so she had picked it up and tucked it into her things.

She’s still thin enough that it only takes a few gulps to get her drunk enough to stop caring about all the dead men whose things she’s going through.

The best find is in the first trunk she looks through–-a slightly-decayed girly mag, manufactured post-war, evidently, judging by the whole eight pages devoted to ghouls and supermutants. She tosses it on her backpack. She can peruse it more fully and to better effect back in the Mojave. Too hungry out here.

There’s a watch in the next trunk, worth a good few caps if she can find a good pawn shop. Mick and Ralph are alright, but Junktown had some good deals on pre-War tech or things based on it–-especially junky little things like this. No one wants a car. They want something for their curio cabinet.

Third trunk has a whole stack of girly mags. She’s seen them all before, though-–standard fare everywhere you can find ’em-–so she leaves them there, but makes note of the possible kindling.

Fourth trunk, though.

Fourth trunk has her staring.

There’s a blanket folded up in there, familiar–-bighorner wool, dyed and embroidered--Grandmam made one for all of them, while she was still alive. She left hers back in the Yard when she left-–too big to carry, too unwieldy, too unnecessary. Tom took his when he left though–-one little bit of sentimentality.

The brahmin stitched into it are faded red-gray now, no longer the crimson they were eighteen years ago when she last saw it. There’s holes chewed in it, by some sort of bug, and a few badly-mended tears too. She unfolds it out of the trunk, lets it drape down into her lap.

She stares at it, a little too drunk to feel anything, but still too sober to think that’s a responsible way to feel.

It dawns on her after a while.

“He’s a marked man,” she murmurs, then again, louder. "He’s a marked man.” And then, once more, voice cracking as she yells, “He’s a marked man!”

She tugs the blanket around herself, bundling it up around her neck. It’s too hot for the nights here, inside buildings, but it’s here and it smells like the laundry detergent mam used and Tom’s deodorant.

“He’s a marked man, and I killed him,” she whispers into the blanket, saying it the same way she and Tom and Tess would share secrets, huddled together on their bed while Mam and Da slept across the room. “I killed my brother, unless he hasn’t come after me yet,” she continues to whisper, the same way she had whispered to Tess about kissing Jenny across the street when she was nine years old and just realizing how pretty girls were. “I turned him into a ghoul,” she whispers to the stitched brahmin so close to her face that she has to cross her eyes, the same way she whispered to Tom about the stray dog she found out along the wall, the one Da had told her they couldn’t feed along with the brother-that-would-become-Les on the way.

She dabs at the tears around her better eye with the edge of her blanket, tries to ignore the sting of salt in unprotected wounds around the other.

She falls asleep bundled up in it–-she knows it’s a bad idea, but it’s very likely it’s all that’s left.

She can’t let it go _now_.


End file.
